Winter 2006 - USC Shoah Foundation - University of Southern ...

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V ISUAL H ISTORY IN THE C LASSROOM Remembering Their Paths New online exhibit follows five survivors through five continents For millions of individuals across Europe, the Holocaust was a catalyst for exile. Families, uprooted and scattered, had to start anew in other countries, marked forever by the tragedy that forced their exodus. The life stories of diverse individuals connected by this common experience of flight, loss, and recovery form the basis of Surviving Auschwitz: Five Personal Journeys, the Shoah Foundation’s latest online educational exhibit. Organized around an interactive map of the world, Surviving Auschwitz traces the crisscrossing paths of five men and women across five continents, utilizing their video testimonies from the Shoah Foundation archive to recount their extraordinary lives before, during, and after the Holocaust. The exhibit follows the journey of Peter Hersch, born in Czechoslovakia, who after the war moved to Sydney, Australia, where he now resides. Joli Hillman-Noy’s course took her from Romania, to Cincinnati, Ohio, and ultimately to Israel. Henia Bryer was born in Poland and went to Palestine in 1946, then on to South Africa. Henry Oertelt’s path runs from Berlin to St. Paul, Minnesota, and French-born Freda Wineman settled in London after the war. All five survivors have one thing in common: They passed through the devastating epicenter of the Holocaust, Auschwitz. With four hours of English-language testimony video clips, more than any other online exhibit on www.vhf.org, Surviving Auschwitz reveals the breadth of experiences that can be culled from the Shoah Foundation’s archive. The exhibit not only conveys the subjects’ personal histories during the Holocaust, but also provides interactive elements that help trace their lives before deportation and after liberation, underscoring the diversity of their cultural backgrounds and subsequent journeys. “This presentation can give students an amazing perspective on cultures and the diversity of the human landscape,” says Marianne G., a 9th grade French teacher who visited the web exhibit. “The testimony of Freda Wineman offers a very interesting description of what it must have been like to be a young girl growing up in prewar France.” According to John Roth, director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, and historical reviewer for the exhibit, “The ‘before’ and ‘after’ dimensions are covered in more detail in Surviving Auschwitz than in most materials that are prepared for teaching purposes.” “More than is usually the case,” says Professor Roth, “the testimonies are accompanied by historical contextualization: Viewers are helped to understand the references that the survivors make to places and events…. This [framework] will be valuable for teachers who use Surviving Auschwitz in classes that focus on the history and implications of the Holocaust.” Lesson plans and other teacher resources will be available to download from the online exhibit. “The testimonies not only drive home that there was unredeemed and unredeemable loss, they also show how people did not let despair overwhelm them,” says Professor Roth. “Instead, they went on, in spite of the odds against them, to rebuild their lives. The testimonies [in Surviving Auschwitz] are stories of determination. They emphasize the importance of not giving up, of not giving in, while at the same time underscoring the Holocaust's devastation.” Surviving Auschwitz: Five Personal Journeys is available free of charge to educators, students, and the general public at www.vhf.org/survivingauschwitz, thanks to generous funding from Bren and Mel Simon and Bui and Herb Simon. ■ New Education Funds With a generous $25,000 donation from Barry Sternlicht, Chairman and CEO of Starwood Hotels Group, the Shoah Foundation established the BARRY STERNLICHT EDUCATION FUND. “I grew up being very protected from the horrors of the war,” says Sternlicht, the son of Holocaust survivors. “My father, who gave his testimony to the Shoah Foundation, never spoke of the war and would turn off TV shows we might see if we passed the room. As I have grown, I remain amazed at the ignorance and the underlying racism and antisemitism that remains today, not only in the United States but around the world. The Shoah Foundation is the living record of the wrong people can do. Hopefully it shows man at his very worst, so that others will never embark on programs of hate and, worse, genocide, based on color, race, or religious beliefs.” The Barry Sternlicht Education Fund enables the Shoah Foundation to pursue a wide range of educational activities in public institutions and schools around the world. ■ David and Laura Merage are long-time supporters of the Shoah Foundation. “As children in Iran we experienced first-hand the difficulty of living in a country where variances in beliefs—religious or otherwise—were not encouraged,” share David and Laura Merage. “We emigrated from Iran knowing the way to extinguish intolerance around the world is to support and promote education that seeks to respect differences.” “We emigrated from Iran knowing the way to extinguish intolerance around the world is to support and promote education that seeks to respect differences.” — David and Laura Merage A recent gift of $25,000 helped establish the DAVID AND LAURA MERAGE FOUNDATION EDUCATION FUND, helping the development and distribution of anti-bias educational resources based on the visual history testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses in the Shoah Foundation archive. ■ “Our father and father-in-law, Harry Hayes, was one of the young American soldiers who liberated the Gunskirchen Concentration Camp in Austria in 1945. The experience fundamentally changed him,” say his daughter, Elizabeth Witten, and her husband, Richard Witten. In Hayes’ honor, they set up the WITTEN FAMILY EDUCATION FUND in Memory of Harry R. Hayes with a gift of $30,000. “Although himself a devout Catholic, Harry believed deeply that all people were equal in the eyes of God and that all religions deserved respect,” share the Wittens. “In his later years, Harry joined with a survivor of Gunskirchen to meet with high school students in the greater Albany, New York, area to speak about tolerance, acceptance, and personal freedom.” “It is our hope that by establishing this fund in his memory, we will enable others to carry forward these messages that Harry Hayes so deeply believed in.” ■ Bloomingdale’s recent $15,000 donation to the Shoah Foundation established the BLOOMINGDALE’S FUND OF THE FEDERATED DEPARTMENT STORES FOUNDATION. “Bloomingdale’s has had a long history of supporting organizations such as the Shoah Foundation,” said Anne Keating, senior vice president of Public Relations, Special Events, and Corporate Philanthropy, from the department store’s headquarters in New York. “We believe in their goal to overcome prejudice and intolerance and to continue to educate our community on these issues. We wish them continued success in all the work they do.” ■ Left: David and Laura Merage Above: The Witten family Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation ® www.vhf.org pastforward, Winter 2006 5
V ISUAL H ISTORY IN THE C LASSROOM Educational Initiatives Around the World HUNGARY– A new Holocausteducation kit designed specifically for Hungarian students reached every secondary school in Hungary at the beginning of the 2005-06 school year. Looking Towards the Future Through the Eyes of the Holocaust—An Educational Package for Hungarian Schools consists of the Shoah Foundation’s Hungarian-language documentary Eyes of the Holocaust on DVD; Gyula Hosszú’s Roads to the Holocaust: stories about the Holocaust, a nationally recognized scholarly book; and Approaches… a comprehensive teacher’s guide that helps educators with context on how to use the film and the book in a classroom setting. Looking Towards the Future… is the result of the combined efforts of the Shoah Foundation, the Hungarian Association of History Teachers, and the Hannah Arendt Association. “A lot of books, films, or documentaries about the Holocaust are being used in schools in Hungary,” says Ms. Luca Illy, the Shoah Foundation’s regional representative in Hungary, “but teachers have to design their own lessons or curriculum around them. Until now, they didn’t have access to resources that were created specifically for classroom use.” László Miklósi, president of the Hungarian Association of History Teachers, conceived of and initiated the idea for the kit. “Visual media and personal experiences are basic and definitive elements in educational practice,” he says. “That is why it was important that [the visual history testimonies in] Eyes of the Holocaust be part of the kit.” “But nothing is usable and applicable in education,” Mr. Miklósi adds, “if there is no appropriate didactic and methodological help offered to educators. The real goal of the study guide is to help teachers create their vision and their own approach to thinking and teaching about this topic.” The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research and the Hungarian Ministry of Education provided the financial support for this project. “I hope that Hungarian educators will first of all think about the role and importance of Holocaust education,” states Mr. Miklósi, “and then, while teaching, use various tools that are appropriate to students' interests and needs. This is essential, as it gives students a complete picture of what happened in the past—how and why—but, most importantly, because it prepares them to think critically and react to what is happening today: acts of intolerance, hatred, and antisemitism.” ■ AUSTRIA– The Austrian organization Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust: Gedächtnis und Gegenwart (National Socialism and the Holocaust: Remembrance and the Present) is producing a Holocaust—and tolerance—education DVD that will center on visual history testimonies from the Shoah Foundation archive. A team of three experts—Markus Barnay, a film editor; History Professor Albert Lichtblau; and Ph.D. candidate Maria Ecker —spent a week at the Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles to search the archive and identify testimonies from Austrian survivors and other witnesses, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners, and Sinti and Roma survivors. “Students are used to visual information today,” says Mr. Barnay, “and we think it’s a good way to engage them not just in terms of learning, but also emotionally. These are real living people who tell about their own lives. This pilot is going to help us determine what the best educational approach is, and what the best use of testimonies is, both for teachers and for students.” The pilot DVD has been financed by the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism and by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture. Additional funding will be needed to finalize the DVD and distribute it to secondary schools in Austria. “We want to facilitate the transmission of the experiences of survivors and other witnesses to the coming generations,” says National Socialism and the Holocaust: Memory and Present director Dr. Werner Dreier, “and we hope that this DVD has an impact on public memory and education in Austria. We anticipate more public funding to come from Austria, but we still need additional support, and we are actively looking for private or corporate sponsorships to help our project come to fruition.” ■ Far left: Students at Budapest’s Alternative Secondary School of Economics (Alternatív Közgazdasági Gimnázium) watch the Shoah Foundation’s documentary Eyes of the Holocaust as part of a lesson from the new educational kit Looking Towards the Future Through the Eyes of the Holocaust Center: (L to R) Eyes of the Holocaust director Janos Szasz, Hungarian minister of education, Bálint Magyar, Steven Spielberg, and Douglas Greenberg Above: Dr. Markus Barnay, journalist and editor; Dr. Albert Lichtblau, University of Salzburg and Dr. Maria Ecker, historian, research testimonies at the Shoah Foundation Recovering Names …Memorializing Lives When the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names was uploaded onto the Yad Vashem website, www.yadvashem.org, in November last year, Yad Vashem announced an International 11th Hour Campaign to recover as many additional names of Holocaust victims as possible, before the generation that best remembers them passes. An urgent call for volunteers to implement grass-roots campaigns is now being issued to Jewish communities and organizations worldwide. The Shoah Foundation has partnered with Yad Vashem in the mission to preserve the legacies of both victims and survivors of the Holocaust by providing access to its 52,000- testimony archive by 2008 at the new Visual Center at Yad Vashem (one hundred testimonies are currently available to view at the Center). At the same time, the Shoah Foundation urges everyone to join the campaign to recover the names and identities of those who did not survive and have yet to be registered in Yad Vashem’s online Database. Experienced interviewers and volunteers—and anyone committed to ensuring that no Holocaust victim is forgotten—would be a significant asset to this endeavor. With the aid of promotional materials developed by Yad Vashem, volunteers will reach out to survivors and their families and assist them in registering the names of men, women, and children who they know were murdered in the Shoah. To request a free guide and resource pack to initiate a names project in your community, please send an email with the subject heading “names campaign” to names.outreach@yadvashem.org.il ■ Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation ® www.vhf.org pastforward, Winter 2006 7
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